Series: Serpent's Tail Classics

Robert Jones is a crew leader in a naval shipyard in Los Angeles in the 1940s. He should have a lot going for him, being educated, with a steady job and a steady relationship. But in the four days covered in this novel, the impossibility of life as a black man in a white world is made devastatingly clear. Jones...

A novel of seduction and madness, animated by the spirits of Wittgenstein, Rousseau, Nabokov and Bolaño. Buenos Aires. The mysterious narrator, who is a student at the School of Philosophy, stalks a middle-aged professor, desperate to reveal that she alone understands his theories. Unable to earn his affection, she strategically seduces a former leftist guerilla and toys with him, blurring...

David Toop's extraordinary work of sonic history travels from the rainforests of Amazonas to the megalopolis of Tokyo via the work of artists as diverse as Brian Eno, Sun Ra, Erik Satie, Kate Bush, Kraftwerk and Brian Wilson. Beginning in 1889 at the Paris exposition when Debussy first heard Javanese music performed, Ocean of Sound channels the competing instincts of...

The Assault, with an introduction by Thomas Harding, is set during the winter of 1945, the last dark days of World War II. Occupied Holland waits for the Allies to arrive. In this tense atmosphere, a Dutch Nazi collaborator, Fake Ploeg, infamous for his cruelty, is assassinated while riding home on his bicycle. His body is moved from one family's...

It is the 1960s, and the Nedokoro brothers have long-since left their family home in a remote forested valley on Shikoku, in the south of Japan: Mitsusaburo for Tokyo to work as a translator and English professor; his younger brother Takashi for the United States, to atone for his part in anti-American student protests. Takashi's return to Japan coincides with...

'My Albertine, how I adored her! Her luminous eyes led me through the darkness of my youth. She was my guide through the nights of one hundred sleeps. And now she is yours.' At the age of twenty-one, a sad and hungry Patti Smith walked into a bookshop in Greenwich Village and decided to spend her last 99 cents on...

Just thirty, with a well-paid job, no love life, and a terrible attitude, the anti-hero of this grim, funny novel smokes four packs of cigarettes a day and writes weird animal stories in his spare time. A computer programmer by day, he is tolerably content, until he's packed off with a colleague — the sexually frustrated Raphael Tisserand — to...

Her name is not Nina, but that's the name she uses sometimes. At her local bar, in the car park with her tricks, when she needs to score. She doesn't really need the money. But it lays bare the truth of each loveless transaction. Still living at home, each chance encounter is a route to escape the tedium of her...

With an introduction by Lynne Tillman Physically beautiful and strangely passive, George Miles attracts his fellow students with a mysterious promise, like a wallet lying on the street. Closer follows the links of desire that drag George into the arms of boys like John, an artist who deliberately drains his portraits of humanity; Alex, fascinated by splatter films and pornography;...

When Muddy Waters came to London at the start of the '60s, a kid from Boston called Joe Boyd was his tour manager; when Dylan went electric at the Newport Festival, Joe Boyd was plugging in his guitar; when the summer of love got going, Joe Boyd was running the coolest club in London, the UFO; when a bunch of...

The cult classic novel from the author of Climbers and The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again with an introduction by bestselling author of Our Wives Under the Sea, Julia Armfield. 'A spare textual elegance and closure-denying restraint that impresses and fulfils' — IAIN BANKS. On a hot May night, three Cambridge students carry out a ritualistic act that changes...

Finalist for the Man Booker International Prize 2015 Gregoire Nakobomayo, a petty criminal, has decided to kill his girlfriend Germaine. He's planned the crime for some time, but still, the act of murder requires a bit of psychological and logistical preparation. Luckily, he has a mentor to call on, the far more accomplished serial killer Angoualima. The fact that Angoualima...

With an Introduction by Gabriel García Márquez. A new translation by Douglas J. Weatherford. In this stunning masterpiece of the surreal, Juan Preciado sets out on a strange quest, bound by a promise to his dying mother. Embarking down a parched and dusty road, Juan goes to seek his father, Pedro Páramo, from whom they fled many years ago. The...

In trailblazing poet, essayist, teacher and activist June Jordan's poems, love is a vision of revolutionary solidarity, crossing borders both emotional and literal with an outstretched hand. Haruko traces the faltering arc of a passionate love affair with another woman while Love Poems encompasses relationships with men and women, political resistance, the need for self-care in a demanding, uncaring world...

'One of the few truly life changing books I've encountered' Torrey Peters, bestselling author of Detransition, BabyFleeing Tucson and her troublesome on-and-off ex-girlfriend, Michelle lands in queer San Francisco's riotous underbelly, stumbling through her early twenties in a haze of nightlife, drug adventures, scams and a string of hookups, break-ups and make-ups. As butches and dykes spin in and out...

In this classic account of the new black music of the 1960s and 70s, celebrated photographer and jazz historian Val Wilmer tells the story of how a generation of revolutionary musicians established black music as the true vanguard of American culture. Placing the achievements of African-American artists such as Albert Ayler, Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane and Sun Ra in their...

A writer of the Harlem Renaissance, Nella Larsen wrote just two novels, published here, and a handful of short stories. Critically acclaimed, both speak powerfully of the contradictions and restrictions experienced by black women at that time. Quicksand, written in 1928, is an autobiographical novel about Helga Crane, a mixed race woman caught between fulfilling her desires and gaining respectability...

Until his death at the age of thirty-three in 1982, Lester Bangs wrote wired, rock 'n' roll pieces on Iggy Pop, The Clash, John Lennon, Kraftwerk, and Lou Reed. As a rock critic, he had an eagle eye for distinguishing the pre-packaged imitation from the real thing. Written in a conversational, wisecracking, erotically charged style, his hallucinatory hagiographies and excoriating...

It's a hot 4th of July night in New York City. In the darkness of the Bronx, thousands of boys have gathered from all across the city. Among them are the warriors of the Coney Island Dominators. Ismael Rivera, leader of the Delancey Thrones, has called an assembly of New York's disparate youth gangs. Why should they keep taking it...

In this seductive and shattering novel, Alison and Veronica meet amid the nocturnal glamour of 1980s New York: one is a former modelling sensation, stumbling away from the wreck of her career, the other an eccentric middle-aged proofreader with a meticulous eye. Over the next twenty years, their friendship will encompass narcissism and tenderness, exploitation and self-sacrifice, love and mortality....